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eat is a verb:

  1. To consume (something solid or semi-solid, usually food) by putting it into the mouth and swallowing it.
    "He’s eating an apple."
  2. To consume a meal.
    "What time do we eat this evening?"
  3. To be eaten.
    "The soup that eats like a meal."
  4. To destroy, consume, or use up
    "This project is eating up all the money."
  5. To cause (someone) to worry.
    "What’s eating you?"
  6. To take the loss in a transaction.
    "It’s a special order, so we can’t send it back; if the customer won’t accept it, we’ll have to eat the forty tons of steel ourselves."
  7. To corrode or erode.
    "The acid rain ate away the statue."
  8. To damage, destroy, or fail to eject a removable part or an inserted object.
    "The VHS recorder just ate the tape and won't spit it out."
  9. To consume money or (other instruments of value, such as a token) deposited or inserted by a user, while failing to either provide the intended product or service, or return the payment.
    "The video game in the corner just ate my quarter."
  10. To perform oral sex on someone.
    "Eat me!"

Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →

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What type of word is eat?

As detailed above, 'eat' is a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: He’s eating an apple.
  2. Verb usage: Don’t disturb me now; can't you see that I’m eating?
  3. Verb usage: What time do we eat this evening?
  4. Verb usage: The soup that eats like a meal.
  5. Verb usage: This project is eating up all the money.
  6. Verb usage: What’s eating you?
  7. Verb usage: It’s a special order, so we can’t send it back; if the customer won’t accept it, we’ll have to eat the forty tons of steel ourselves.
  8. Verb usage: I have to have him in court tomorrow, if he doesn't show up, I forfeit the bond and I have to eat the $300,000 - From the movie Midnight Run
  9. Verb usage: The acid rain ate away the statue.
  10. Verb usage: The strong acid eats through the metal.
  11. Verb usage: The VHS recorder just ate the tape and won't spit it out.
  12. Verb usage: John is late for the meeting because the photocopier ate his report.
  13. Verb usage: The video game in the corner just ate my quarter.
  14. Verb usage: Eat me!

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of eat are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of eat, and guess at its most common usage.

Word Type

For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

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